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ADDRESS 

DELIVERED AT LOS ANGELES, CAL, JULY 3, 1897 
BY 

HOLDRIDGE O^^COLLINS, 

President of the California Society Sons of the Revolution 
AT THE 

Contmcmoiratitic Celebration 

OF 

CALIFORNIA'S FIRST FOURTH OF JULY 



Ladies and Gentlemen : 

Macaulay says that "a people which takes no pride in the 
noble achievements of remote ancestors, will never achieve any- 
thing worthy to be remembered with pride by remote descend- 
ants," and Edmund Burke in one of his famous orations has a 
similar idea in declaring that " those who do not treasure up the 
memory of their ancestors, do not deserve to be remembered by 
their posterity." 

The Society of Sons of the Revolution, existing in nearly 
every State and Territory of our country, with an earnest and 
zealous membership of about 6000 gentlemen, has, as one of its 
principal objects, the perpetuation of the records of those whose 
sacrifices of blood and treasure, wrested from the most powerful 



•■4 



nation of the earth, an empire, whose natal day as an independent 
sovereignty we celebrate this evening. 

Our Society has been charged with being only a didactic ex- 
position of sentimental ideas ; that its dominating principles are 
pride of ancestry and class exclusiveness ; that its most important 
work is devoted to the establishing of a genealogical descent 
through four or five generations of American progenitors, that we 
may say we are not as this publican whose father came to us in 
the steerage. 

How far from the truth are these statements, every member of 
the order knows; and it is my pleasure to tell you something of 
the practical work already accomplished, and the objects sought 
by the Sons of the Revolution. 

Within the last twenty years more light has been thrown upon 
the actors of our great struggle for independence than during 
the previous century, and we now are able to look at them as 
the}' were, men who combined with their heroic fortitude all of 
the passions and frailties of humanity. 

We have been accustomed to look upon them with such rever- 
ence that we have ceased to regard them as human, like our- 
selves, but we have placed them upon a pedestal for worship, as 
being but a little lower than the gods. 

Washington himself, whose biographers, Sparks and Irving, 
found it too dangerous to show in all the phases of this character, 
is known to have had the passions, frailties and amiable weak- 
nesses of the soldier as well as the civilian. 

The exhibition at times of his ungoverned rage appalled his 
associates, and the army and Congress never for a moment were 
permitted to lose sight of the fact that in him was the aristocrat 
in whom was found to an unusual degree the pride of birth and 
of social environment 

With this grave reserve of the exclusive gentleman, was a for- 
bearance for unintended faults, a kindly consideration for all, and 
a heart very vulnerable to the softer feelings of our nature. 

We know the charming story of how he fell thrall to the love- 
liness of the beautiful widow, and we ma}^ now almost hear him 
asking himself, in the words of a late writer — "Is it love I feel 
for this young goddess with yellow hair and light blue eyes, with 
her moist ripe lips so richly framed for happy love and laughter ?' ' 



Shall it be that the heart of the American people will ever 
cease to thrill with the memory of this happy union of ardent 
passion and accordant tastes ? 

That Washington, the man, was loved for those touches of 
nature which make the whole world kin, is exemplified in the 
person of your fellow citizen, George Washington Peachy, whom 
I am proud to present to you this evening as a member of our 
Society, the son of a private soldier, who endured all the hard- 
ships of Valley Forge and participated in the Battles of Princeton, 
Monmouth and Yorktown. 

Mr. Peachy received his name in the veneration engendered in 
his father's heart through personal contact with that great chief 
whom he loved as a man while obeying him as a general. 

The late discoveries among the musty National and State 
archives, through the instrumentality of the patriotic hereditary 
societies of Colonial Wars, Colonial Dames, the Cincinnati, and 
the Sons and Daughters of the Revolution, have shown, with 
startling certainty, that most of the vital questions discussed at 
the present day, pertaining to the government and management 
of the domestic and foreign affairs of the Nation, were anxiously 
considered when its foundation stones were laid. 

Some of the purposes of the establishment of the Society of 
Sons of the Revolution, as enunciated in our constitution, are the 
perpetuation of the " memory of the services of their ancestors 
and of the times in which they lived, and to inspire the members 
of the Society with the patriotic spirit of their forefathers." 

They have passed away, but their principles survive. Their 
fight was not for freedom only, but for justice as well, and their 
descendants, the Sons of the Revolution, not unmindful that they 
were unable to accomplish all for which they strove, have taken 
up as part of their work some of the most serious questions which 
engaged their attention, and which, from time to time, during 
the last century, like Banquo's ghost, have risen to confront us, 
which will not down and which must be met. 

Our Society literature, our public addres.ses and our individual 
efforts, have been for years, and aie at the present time, addressed 
to the subjects of 

I. 

The taxation of church property. 



II. 

An educational qualification for the electoral franchise; and 

III. 
Foreign immigration. 

One of our members, a clergyman ot the Episcopal Church, in 
an address delivered before the Ohio Societ}*, said : 

" It is a notorious \-iolation of the principles of our forefathers 
when subsidies are granted and taxes exempted in the interest of 
corporations at the expense of those who have no representation 
therein. In the City of Baltimore the taxable property amounts 
to $209,000,000, while the property exempted is valued at 
$215,000,000. The rate of taxation is doubled in the interest of 
private corporations, in which the people as such, have no voice 
or representation. In the State of Xew York a religious corpora- 
tion, receives from the State by exemption from taxation $600,- 
000 a 3'ear. 

Benjamin Franklin said, ' when a religion is good, it will sup- 
port itself ; and when God does not take care ot it, it is a prettj- 
good sign that He does not want it.' 

The times call for readjustment of the matter. Corporations 
whose members have any self-respect should demand it. It is a 
revolutionary principle and is a legitimate subject for considera- 
tion by all who are engaged in the perfection of those principles 
for which George Washington gave his means, his might and the 
bestj'ears of his life." 

This e%-il prevails to an alarming extent throughout most of 
the United States, and the untold millons of dollars held and con- 
trolled by religious corporations, exempt from all taxation, are a 
menace to our public prosperity, our domestic peace and to the 
integrity- of the verj' principles of those religious bodies which 
have secured such exemption by Constitutional provisions or 
Legislative enactments. 

No one in this audience vnll take issue with the proposition, 
urged by the Sons of the Revolution, that the ballot should 
be permitted to him or her onh* who knows how to cast it with 
intelligence. 



I make no distinction in this regard between the sexes. Per- 
sonally I am a believer in female suffrage. The woman of prop- 
erty and intelligence, whose annual taxes are a paft of the 
revenue of the State, should be permitted a voice in the gov- 
ernment which she helps to maintain. In denying her a vote 
we are false to the principles for which our ancestors fought— No 
taxation without representation. 

An educational standard, as well as perhaps a property qualifica- 
tion, should be required from every citizen before he be permitted 
a voice in the government for the whole. 

The subject of unrestricted foreign immigration is one which 
since the time of Washington has given food for the most anxious 
thought to our most profound statesmen. 

" The first riots in which an intense desire to use firearms and 
kill was shown, were in 1S44, which were begun by foreign- 
ers firing into a meeting of native Americans. From this we 
have gone steadily on, until we now have more rioting, bloodshed 
and murder in a single year, or even in six months, than can be 
found in a hundred years of our previous history, and in almost 
every instance it can be traced to the alien element in our pop- 
ulation." 

Upon the subject of immigration Washington wrote : 
"My opinion with respect to immigration is that, except of 
useful mechanics and some particular descriptions of men or 
professions, there is no need of encouragement. While the pol- 
icy or advantage of its taking place in a body (I mean the settling 
of them in a body) may be much questioned. 

"It is not the policy of this country to employ aliens where 
it can well be avoided either in the civil or military walks of 
life." 

Thomas Jefferson, for the most part, in opposition to the 
policy of W^ashington wrote as follows, in referring to immi- 
grants to our shores : 

' ' They will bring with them the principles of the government 
they leave, imbibed in their early youth, or if able to throw them 
off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, pass- 
ing as is usual from one extreme to another. It would be a 
miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate lib- 
erty. Their principles, with their language, they will transmit 



to their children. In proportion to their members they will share 
with us the legislation. They will inspire into it their spirit, 
warp and bias its direction, and render it a heterogeneous, inco- 
herent, distracted mass. If they come of themselves they are en- 
titled to all the rights of citizenship, but I doubt the expediency 
of inviting them by extraordinary encouragements. I mean 
not these doubts should be extended to the importation of use- 
ful artificers." 

You will note the agreement with Washington's statement, 
" that except of useful mechanics and some particular de- 
scriptions of men or professions there is no need of encourage- 
ment." 

' ' These Fathers of the Republic were entirely opposed to 
promiscuous, wholesale immigration. The importation of 
paupers, vagrants and criminals, together with hundreds of 
thousands of men and women capable of onl3' cheap manual labor, 
was altogether foreign to their thoughts ; or, if they contemplated 
it at all, it was only to revolt from it." 

Madison, who favored immigration, strenuously insisted that 
he referred only to the " worthy part of mankind," and in one of 
his papers he uses these words : 

" I am obliged at the same time to say that it is not 
either the provision of our laws or the practice of the 
government to give any encouragement to emigrants un- 
less it be in cases where they may bring with them some 
special addition to our stock of arts or articles of culture. ' ' 

These are some of the underlying principles upon which the 
structure. Sons of the Revolution, has been erected. They are the 
shibboleth of our organization, and we believe them to be 
the sentiments of the majority of the patriotic American cit- 
izens. That there is an honest difference of opinion as to 
these matters, no one can justly deny, and they will not cease 
troubling us until they shall be settled by legal enactments. 

We welcome to our membership, regardless of social position, 
pecuniary responsibility, political creed or religious convictions, 
any reputable citizen, eligible by descent, whether he be the la- 
borer in the fields, the jurist upon the bench, or the highest exec- 
utive of the land. 

The agitation of many of the questions of the time, some of 



which strike deep against the foundation of those principles which 
we believe to be the cause of our present National freedom aud 
happiness, requires a watchfulness which we have sufficient con- 
fidence to believe we can exercise. 

We take no issue with Chancellor Kent when he says that "he 
who serves his country well requires not ancestry to make him 
noble," but we do believe that occasions present themselves at 
the present day, as they did during the Revolution, when none 
but Americans should be put on guard. 

"The disease of the present day is superiority. There are 
more saints than niches.' ' 

There is too much truth in the remark that " we are all ticketed, 
not according to what we have. A man ot energy in shirt sleeves 
wins little or no recognition. This sort of estimate too frequently 
rules in all governments. A minister sends a paltry medal to a 
sailor who saves a dozen lives at the peril of his own, but he be- 
stows the cross of honor on a deputy who sells him a vote. Woe 
to the country thus constituted." 

Is there not room and a work for such an organization as ours, 
whose attention is devoted to the conservation of the hereditary 
principles of this magnificent heritage, and whose greatest 
pride is the fact, as stated by our General President, Hon. 
John Lee Carroll, Governor of Maryland, in his last address, 
that there has never "been a single individual man who has 
ever been suspected of using or turning to his own personal 
ends any advantage of his position or what he may obtain as a 
member ot the Sons of the Revolution. 

"It is well known that politics, religion, sectional feeling, 
jealousies of all kinds, are absolutely excluded from our de- 
liberations, and one strong feeling of brotherhood, fraternal 
brotherhood, extends throughout the length and breadth of 
the land." 

We, particularly, are moved by that most tender of all State 
papers, Washington's Farewell Address, and our pulses are 
quickened when we read the calm loving words, " The name of 
American, which belongs to you, in your national capacity, must 
always exalt the just pride of patriotism, more than any appella- 
tion derived from local discriminations. With slight shades of 
difference you have the same religion, manners, habits and politi- 



cal principles. You have in a common cause fought and tri- 
umphed together. The independence and liberty you possess 
are the work of joint councils and joint efforts — of common 
dangers, sufferings and successes." 
Those who battled lor us have gone. 

"The knights are dust, 
And their good swords are rust. 
Their souls are with the saints, we trust." 

And the entire land won by them contains less than twenty of 
their living children, but we, their heritors in the third and fourth 
generation take up the work, with confidence in its eternal prin- 
ciples of justice, with the courage of patriotism, and an assured 
belief in our might to keep what they gave. 

We honor them for their invincible courage, we glory in their 
deeds, we reverence them for their fortitude, our hearts are filled 
with an humble gratitude for the sacrifices made for us ; and 
never, until time shall end, will the American heart cease to re- 
spond to the memory of such an ancestry. 

"On fame's eternal camping ground 
Their silent tents are spread, 
And glory guards with solemn round 
The bivouac of the dead." 



July 4t}?, 1847 ^f 




July 4tl7, 1897 



The -f- 



HISTORICAL SOCIETY 

of SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA. 

ESCHSCHOLTZIA CHAPTER. 

Daughters of the American Re-votution, 
,.,3.nd the.., 

CALIFORNIA SOCIETY. 

Sons of the Re'voluiion, 

In-vite you to be present at a. 



I GnpnperrpoFative 
©elebFatiopj. 

of C^aliforQia'5 
. pirst pourtl? of July 



In the Halt of the FRIDAY SMORNING CLUB 
€Nfi. 330/2 South Broad'way 

AT 8 O'CLOCK P. M. 



JULY 3rd. t897 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



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